


see (not), hear (not), speak (not)

by stjarna



Series: Engineering vs Biochem - 2017 (Team Engineering) [14]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Academy Era, Birthday, Engineering VS Biochem, F/M, Fitz's Mum mentioned, Gen, Platonic FitzSimmons, Team Engineering, Team Engineering's Happy Birthday Leopold Fitz, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 15:42:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11970486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stjarna/pseuds/stjarna
Summary: Written for Team Engineering's Happy Birthday Leopold Fitz Event.Prompt: Fitz's wish is to spend his birthday with Jemma (Academy Era)





	see (not), hear (not), speak (not)

**Author's Note:**

> Big thank you to @dilkirani for the beta.
> 
> Banner by me.

It had been almost one year at the Academy, and Fitz sometimes still couldn’t quite believe how quickly time had passed and how much his life had changed. He’d barely turned seventeen when the academic year had started last year, clearly one of the youngest students. He’d celebrated his birthday in Scotland with his mum, then flew to the States days later to attend the orientation for new cadets.

This year, school had started slightly earlier, so Fitz was now faced with celebrating his birthday in the States. He didn’t really care. He’d never much cared for birthdays anyways.

Cake. Yes. Birthdays. Oh well.

But his mum had been disappointed she wouldn’t be able to celebrate with him and worried that he’d be by himself. To top things off, his present hadn’t fit in his already overstuffed suitcase, so they’d agreed that his mum would send it right after he left for the airport. She’d called him every day for a week asking if the package had finally arrived (it hadn’t), and to remind him that he should be sure to ask his friends to celebrate his birthday with him (he only had one friend really and he hadn’t asked her… yet).

* * *

Fitz taps the floor with the tip of his shoe, his head tilted slightly to one side to keep his phone in place as he tries to put his laptop into his backpack. “Yes, Mum, I promise. Love you. Talk to you soon!”

He straighens up, letting his phone slide off his shoulder to catch it in his hand and hang up the call. He stares at the screen, his thumb lingering for a moment on the ‘end call’ button as he sighs deeply.

_‘Suppose, I promised her._

* * *

* * *

“Well, this has been a rather productive evening, don’t you think?” Jemma picks up her laptop and slides it into the padded sleeve of her backpack, smiling widely, clearly satisfied with a job well done. “It’s good to be back. Be productive. A new academic year. A new semester. New courses. New teachers. New challenges. It’s quite thrilling.”

Fitz nods, trying to ignore his anxious heartbeat. He stuffs his own laptop into his bag, relieved when Jemma doesn’t seem to notice that it almost slips from his sweaty hands. “Yes. Yeah. Definitely. Very productive.”

Jemma zips up her backpack before looking at Fitz, her lips still pulled into a wide smile. “I’m very pleased we finished this homework assignment already. It’ll give us time to work on that drone idea you mentioned the other day.”

Fitz can’t seem to stop his head from bobbing up and down like one of those bobble head dogs, as he shoulders his backpack on one side. “Yes. Yeah. Definitely. The drone. Yes.”

_Bloody hell, Fitz. She’s your friend. You want to ask her to hang out on your birthday, not help hide a body._

“Are you alright?” Jemma tilts her head slightly to one side, looking at Fitz full of concern.

Fitz’s eyes widen in shock.

_Great. Well done, Fitz._

Nervously, he rubs the back of his neck. “Huh? Yeah. I… I’m fine. Why’d you ask?”

Jemma shrugs ever so slightly. “You seem… I don’t know… nervous?”

Fitz immediately removes his hand from his neck as if he could burn the evidence. “Me? No. I’m not… well—”

He lets out a deep sigh.

_Come on, Fitz. It’s not that hard._

“I… I wanted to ask you something,” he admits, gesturing at Jemma.

“Oh.” The smile returns to Jemma’s face, causing her eyes to sparkle curiously. “Well, of course. That’s certainly nothing to be nervous about, is it now?”

Fitz shakes his head. “No. No, I suppose it’s not. I… I was wondering if you wanted to… umm… hang out on Friday? Order food? Maybe watch a movie?”

Jemma’s eyes widen before they wander briefly to one side as she ponders Fitz’s suggestions. The corners of her mouth are ticked up when she looks back at him. “Well, that’s certainly a lovely idea. We haven’t spent a lot of time together since the semester started, and those times that we have spent together, we’ve been very focused on our homework assignments and haven’t had much opportunity to partake in more social activities. And it would be nice to ring in the new academic year.”

Fitz gestures at Jemma, unable to hide his happiness. “Great, because it’s actually my—”

“But, as you know,” Jemma interrupts him before he can finish his sentence, leaving him with his mouth gaping ajar. “I always reserve my Fridays to go over and organize my notes from the previous week.”

Fitz closes his mouth, nodding in understanding and trying to hide his disappointment. “Oh. Right. Of course. Yes. I… I can’t believe I forgot that.”

“It’s part of my routine, Fitz,” Jemma explains, apologetically. “Otherwise everything gets in such disarray so quickly.”

Once again Fitz’s head turns into a bobble head. “Yeah, no. I know… I like my routines too.”

“But we can certainly plan on it for another day!” Jemma suggests.

“Yes. No. Definitely.”

Once again, Jemma’s face is adorned with a wide smile. “Well, I should head back to my room now.”

She shoulders her backpack and straightens up. “Same time tomorrow?”

Fitz nods. “Yes. Definitely. Same time. Same lab.”

He watches her leave, sighing deeply once he’s sure she’s out of earshot.

_Well, I tried._

* * *

* * *

Jemma waits outside Fitz’s dorm room, surprised and a little annoyed that her friend is not there, when their study session was supposed to start ten minutes ago.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Fitz’s voice suddenly echoes through the hallway.

Jemma turns her head, watching Fitz walk hurridly down the hallway with a package under his arm. He stops in front of her, slightly out of breath, lifting the box a little higher.

“My mum sent this and she’s been anxious for it to arrive and I… I had to pick it up at the post office and the line was—”

Jemma smiles, waving him off. “Oh, no worries, I’ve been here for mere seconds.”

He gives her a skeptical look, knowing her well enough to realize she would have been there on the spot at their agreed upon time.

“Alright, maybe not seconds,” Jemma admits, and a triumphant smile flashes across Fitz’s face.

He opens the door and lets her into his room. Jemma steps inside, scrunching her nose at the dirty laundry scattered across the floor. But she politely steps over it and sits down on his bed, while he puts the package on his small desk.

“Care package from your mum?” Jemma asks, putting her book bag down next to her on the mattress.

Fitz turns half way around to look at her and nods. “Something like that.”

“Feel free to open it.”

He looks a bit flustered, gesturing back and forth between the two of them. “But we’re already late with our study sess—”

Jemma tilts her head to the side, rolling her eyes slightly. “Oh, please, Fitz. It’s perfectly fine and maybe she put some of those delicious biscuits in again.” She can’t stop a little grin from appearing on her lips as she remembers Mrs Fitz’s homemade biscuits. “It would be a perfect little reward snack while we study.”

Fitz chuckles awkwardly. “Yeah. Maybe. Let’s hope they survived the flight better than the last package. It was something like seventy-five percent crumbs.”

“Very tasty crumbs.”

Fitz smiles at her shyly, before focusing on the package, opening it carefully with a pocket knife.

Jemma’s eyes widen when she notices the colorfully wrapped present he pulls out of the parcel. “Oh. Is it your birthday soon? Mine is just a couple of weeks away.”

Fitz does a strange little double take, focusing rather hard on the present in his hands, almost as if he were avoiding her eyes.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, putting the gift down on his desk and tucking his hands into his pockets. “It… it was Friday actually.”

Jemma can’t hide her surprise as a sharp gasp escapes her lips. “What? It was your birthday? Why didn’t I—?” She pauses, her eyes wandering aimlessly side to side as she remembers the previous week. “Wait. Is that why you wanted to hang out?”

Fitz’s hand shoots to the back of his neck and he scratches it vigorously. “Yeah. Well. It’s okay. Doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, Fitz.” Jemma pushes herself up to standing. “Why didn’t you say something? I would have been delighted to celebrate your birthday with you. I can’t believe I didn’t even know when it was. We’ve known each other for a year now.”

Both of Fitz’s hands are once again securely tucked away in his pockets as he shrugs briefly. “Yeah, well, we didn’t really speak with each other for at least four of those months, and then summer break, and—”

He pulls one hand back out, gesturing in Jemma’s direction and grinning awkwardly. “Plus, it was Friday. Organizing-notes-day. You had your routine.”

Jemma furrows her brows. “Well, for a special occasion like this, I would have most certainly been willing to—”

“It was fine,” Fitz interrupts her, his tone almost apologetic. “I… I picked up some Chinese food and watched The Lord of the Rings—”

Jemma feels her eyes welling up. “You spent your birthday by yourself.”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry. I don’t really care about birthdays that much.” His tone is soft without even a hint of bitterness. It’s almost as if he is trying to comfort her, when he’s the one who’d—

“Fitz. Why on earth wouldn’t you tell me—?”

“I’m sorry, okay, I—” He stops mid-sentence, turning his back on her and running his hand through his hair, and Jemma can tell she’s pushed him too far.

“Well, you don’t need to be… you have no reason to—” Jemma lets out a deep sigh. “Gosh, now I’m making you apologize for feeling uncomfortable asking me to spend time with you on your birthday when all I—”

She stops herself again, taking a cleansing breath and calming her voice. “Okay. Let’s regroup.”

She pauses for a moment, waiting until Fitz slowly turns around, his eyes still shimmering with an entirely unnecessary guilty conscious.

“I would have been delighted to spend your birthday with you,” Jemma admits truthfully. “And I apologize if I have given you any reason to think you couldn’t comfortably approach me on this topic. We are friends. Best friends, I had hoped, and I would very much like to state for the record that in the future I’d love for us to spend our birthdays together.”

She takes another deep breath and straightens up. “In fact, if you are so inclined then I would be really quite happy and thrilled if you’d be willing to spend my birthday with me, which is coming up on September 11.”

Fitz tucks his hands back into his pockets, his eyes wandering to the ground but one corner of his mouth ticking up into a shy smile.

“’Course I would,” he replies quietly, glancing back up in her direction.

Jemma can’t help but smile herself. “Maybe we could even take that opportunity to also celebrate your birthday retroactively? Make it a joint-celebration so to speak seeing that our birthdays are so close together?”

Fitz shrugs, tapping the floor with the tip of his shoe. “You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t have to, but I’d love to.”

He smiles at her shyly, his blue eyes looking at her with gratitude. “Sounds good.”

“Any cake preferences?”

The corners of his mouth pull into a wide grin. “Any cake is a good cake.”

Jemma bops her head in confirmation. “Well then, that’s settled. How about we get some studying done, so we don’t fall completely behind?”

Fitz lets out a single laugh. “As if.”

* * *

* * *

When they meet two weeks later on Jemma’s birthday, the cake Jemma had baked and decorated with enough candles for the both of them is nothing but extraordinary.

Jemma seems really quite thrilled over the desk organizer system Fitz had built for her, agreeing that it is better suited to her organizing technique than her old one. She even laughs over the copy of _Organizing from the Inside Out: The Foolproof System For Organizing Your Home, Your Office and Your Life_ that Fitz had hidden in the bottom drawer of his present as a joke.

Fitz knows he shouldn’t be surprised when Jemma shyly pulls out a wrapped present for him from her closet. Naturally, she would have gotten him something even though he’d tried to tell her multiple times that it really wasn’t necessary.

“I haven’t noticed that you own one of these yet, although I obviously don’t know if you maybe have one back home in Scotland,” Jemma remarks when Fitz pulls the little figurine with the three monkeys out of the box.

“I don’t… I don’t have one,” Fitz admits, his fingers gliding over the bronze surface of the little statuette, a grateful smile playing on his lips.

“And while I’m sure you are aware that _mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru,_ has most commonly been used to embody the proverbial principle of ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,’ which has been interpreted in various different ways—” Jemma continues, her words tumbling out in her usual faster-than-life way when she’s excited about a topic and ready to spill out a carefully prepared lecture. “—the most literal translation of these words—to my knowledge—is simply ‘see not, hear not, speak not.’ So, my intention with this gift is to a) acknowledge and celebrate your love for primates and—”

She stops mid-speech, which is enough of a rare occurrence that it causes Fitz to look up from where his eyes had been fixed on the three monkeys in his hands. Her expression seems rather somber and her eyes look a bit misty and Fitz’s not entirely sure what would have caused her to be sad, or sentimental, or angry.

_Gosh, why am I so bad at reading emotions sometimes?_

“And b),” Jemma finally continues, unable to hide the tiniest hint of a nervous tremor in her voice even though she sounds otherwise quite confident, “the present is meant to let you know that when it comes to us and our friendship, you should _not_ take the most literal interpretation of the monkeys’ advice to heart and should rather see, hear, and most importantly speak, instead of keeping things to yourself.”

“Thank you.” Fitz can’t help but smile, feeling his own eyes well up too. “The same goes for you though, alright?”

“Absolutely.” Jemma nods in agreement, her lips pulled into a closed-mouth smile, causing her nose to scrunch up.

For a moment, they stare at each other in awkward silence, until Jemma gestures at the half-eaten cake on her desk.

“More cake?” she asks excitedly.

Fitz grins widely. “Don’t mind if I do.”


End file.
